LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] Is it a good idea to try speeding up slackware boot with e4rat?

- Slackware (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/)

- - Is it a good idea to try speeding up slackware boot with e4rat? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/is-it-a-good-idea-to-try-speeding-up-slackware-boot-with-e4rat-4175478430/)

On semi related note, I found a big improvement in Slackware's boot-up time by editing rc files and adding “&” every here and there allowing various tasks to be run in parallel.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jtsn (Post 5036719)

While e4rat is an interesting project, it's about 10 years too late. The industry is already in the final transition from rotating media to flash...

Even without SSD I already got more speed improvement by putting my system into an lzo-compressed squashfs on mechanical HDD.
I am more willing to try ext4 defrag on my home partition and not the system partion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by guanx (Post 5037332)

Even without SSD I already got more speed improvement by putting my system into an lzo-compressed squashfs on mechanical HDD.

That's an interesting idea! How do you handle updates?

Quote:

Originally Posted by jtsn (Post 5037353)

That's an interesting idea! How do you handle updates?

I am actually using aufs3 over squashfs. I apply updates normally and try out for a few days. During this time I do not turn off the system but rather suspend to disk, so my writable branch, which is a tmpfs, will not get erased. If nothing broken by the update, I reboot to my regular system (on ext4, without squashfs, aufs and etc.) doing the updates again, and make a new "sysimage" squashfs image. I also have a "changes" image, which is layered on "sysimage". I put small changes, such as kernel module updates, changes to "/etc" and so on into the small "changes" filesystem image so I don't have to compress the whole system for minor changes that do not affect speed.

Example filesystem structure:

Code:

/ (aufs, br=tmpfs:changes.squashfs:sysimage.squashfs) --- home (ext4)

                                                      +- tmp (ext4)

                                                      +- var/tmp (ext4)

                                                      +- usr/src (nilfs2)